Many years ago, when I was director of sales automation at MCI Worldcom, my
team released a tool that built proposals on-the-fly from a library of
boilerplate Microsoft Word documents. This enabled sales people to select,
customize and assemble boilerplates into a proposal within minutes. It saved
people from re-inventing the wheel and helped keep our message consistent
across all proposals.
There was also tremendous return on investment (ROI) because the tool saved
us a boatload of money: by giving our field reps the ability to create their
own proposals from existing material, we could eliminate the need to hire
additional proposal writers in the field -- and we could speed the delivery of
our proposals to our prospects -- a great way to close the deal faster!
For years I longed to see a similar tool developed for PowerPoint
presentations, but the technology was not available yet -- until now. Presentation
Librarian from Accent Graphics is a God-send to corporate
marketing communications and field sales. Gone are the days where every
presentation needs to be custom built. Now with just a few clicks of a button,
you can build a new presentation based upon slides from existing
presentations!
For the purposes of our evaluation, we used a Windows 2000
system with 128 MB RAM on a 500 Mhz system. Presentation
Librarian is exceptionally easy to install and use and offers a very
intuitive interface. Using its wizard, you are able to have the tool scan your
drive for files to be included in the library. These files may include various
media including your PowerPoint files. Then you can organize these files into
different folders -- perhaps for different products, pitches, vertical
markets, etc.
To build a new presentation, you simply search for slides. The
search engine options in Presentation
Librarian are exceptionally strong enabling you to search the text in
the slide including title, bullets, slide text, slide notes, or user keywords.
You can search by date, text strings, and match any - all - exact wording.
This is a very powerful search engine, and it works fast.
You can view thumbnails of the slides, and by clicking on
them, expand them to a larger size. This makes visually scanning for the right
slides easy. You can right click on the thumbnails to read the slide notes --
wow! By right clicking, you can select individual slides, and these appear on
your Export List.
After you review the slides on your Export List, you simply
tell Presentation
Librarian to create the final presentation. Instantly, the files are
exported and saved to a new PowerPoint file, and PowerPoint is launched so you
can preview and further customize your final presentation.
This is a fantastic tool to implement if you are looking for a
fast and immediate way to lower in-house production costs, free time up for
sales people to sell instead of wasting time trying to be graphic artists, and
to get the presentation back to the prospect quicker so you can close business
faster.
In fact, Accent Graphics includes a helpful paper on
how to calculate your ROI (return on investment) using Presentation
Librarian. I can't imagine any company who uses PowerPoint who won't
find a long list of tangible and intangible benefits to implementing Presentation
Librarian immediately. It probably pays for itself within the first
few presentations you build. This is one of those rare "no-brainer"
investments. Buy it now; you'll thank me later!
There are several different versions of Presentation
Librarian to choose from including the Personal Edition, Workgroup
Edition, Enterprise Edition (a powerful web-based version great for corporate
intranets with remote sales people), and an ASP-based version where they will
host and maintain your presentations for you (perfect for those companies with
smaller IT teams).
I can't say enough good things about this tool. Everything
about it, from their web site to the packaging, from the interface to the ease
of use, makes this one of the finest automation tools I have seen in ages.
Highly recommended! Click here
to download a demo and to learn more about Presentation
Librarian.
